Did you fit a snorkel ?

[Shayne]

Yes but i will soon have a 3" straight through exhaust coming off the turbo so it can expel everything much faster and i while i'm no expert (not by a long way) i can't help but think the turbo is gonna have to suck all the harder as a result .

 

[Chris]

Shayne, you ARE making yourself clear. Maybe we aren't so let me be clear. "Wake up Shayne, wake up, you are in Lah Lah land again' Forget it, it won't work. It won't make any difference you are wasting your time even considering it. If you turn up the air, you dilute the fuel!! You can't turn up the fuel on an electronic fuel pump in a Colorado. It's not a carburettor. The diesel engine sucks in air like a donkey hoovering up strawberries. You can drive with the bonnet off if you like and no air filter in and a pair of bellows pumping for all you are worth. All you'll get is tired arms.

Sorry matey. Next project please.

 

[stumog]

its a very small gain when you are ramming air in to an engine. when you are talking big boys toys you are willing to add that tiny bit just to get as much as possible. On a standard engine are you going to gain? I really dont think its worth what you would put in as its such a small gain?
stu

 

[Chris]

I see what you are saying about flow through the exhaust, but what you don't understand is that the exhaust is a restriction at the moment so the turbo doesn't spool up so easily. When you remove that restriction you are setting the turbo free. It's not that it is going to suck in more, it's simply going to be able to blow out what it has already been getting thereby freeing up 'resistance' The performance increase you may get is not due to more coming into the engine, it's less power being sapped blowing it out

 

[Shayne]

I see that does make sense Chris and that's the whole point of questions it's a lot easier to ask than try it and gauge the results . I still have a niggling doubt though , an intercooler is known to increase power and it works by cooling and expanding the air mid cycle ?

 

[Chris]

Ahh yes it does Shayne, but by cooling the air coming in so that it is denser. That means for the same volume of air, there is more oxygen in it. Just giving it more air doesn't work you see? Your cylinders hold 3 litres of fuel and air mix. No matter how much air you give it, that doesn't change. You need to do something more clever. One way is nitrous oxide. This is simply a really very very concentrated way to get more oxygen in. The other is to cool. You can actually see the difference in theory on a cold day v a hot day and of course at altitude where there is less oxygen and cars run badly.

Make sense? And of course ram fed induction only works when you go fast enough, which isn't when you need the power. If you wanted low down grunt, a cooler or a trumpet makes no real difference.

 

[stumog]

an intercooler works by cooling the in coming air. so if you have 2l of oxygen a min. an intercooler will condence the air so you get 3l of oxygen in the same volume of air as its more dense with oxygen. it works the same as going up a mountain reduces the amount of oxgen in the same amount of air.
this is very different to a ram effect on the engine.

 

[Shayne]

OK thanks folks i can bin that idea now and won't spend half the night trying to put it out of my head so i can get some sleep . I will be back tomorrow so you can explain how exactly that car Michael J Fox had worked

 

[stumog]

thats a really easy one. from the food in the bin. and the tv said so.
stu

 

[clivehorridge]

Another one here who knows nothing about diesels and even less about 90s, but I remember the old days trying to get more power out of our Mini and my MG Midget engine. What I learned was that engines breathe. Like you and I we suck air in, the lungs processes part of it and we exhale what we don't use (which includes a lot of oxygen and other gasses that we breathed in in the first place).

Mixing fuel with air is a complicated business to get it right across the rev ranges and load conditions we put on an engine. Messing with that carefully balanced process is only going to screw up tens of years of R&D.

On petrol engines it was easy to increase the power of an engine by increasing the amount of fuel/air mix, simply add another choke to your carburetor. Meaning, if you had a single choke carb, remove it and put on a twin choke. We had three chokes on the 1071 mini we used to rally, two Reece-fish cross flow twins with the end choke blanked off using 3 out of the 4 chokes.

That on a standard engine may improve things but only increasing the ability to inhale doesn't make the runner go faster does it? You have to make the burning process more efficient too. So you increase compression ratios, you open up the intake ports and valves, then you start looking at breathing out.

Ours had a stage 2 head, higher lift cams, bigger valves, polished ports... LCB headers, larger diameter zorst, but any one of these things on their own is no use.

Dragsters have been using blowers since the ICE was invented (almost) but on its own a blower will do almost nothing without other mods to match it.

Modern engines are of course finely balanced to give an optimum performance right across the range of uses. Messing with that will just mess it up.

IMO, better to spend time keeping the engine in the condition that it was designed to be. That is clean from carbon and gunk build-up, nothing to restrict what the designer spent his whole life trying to achieve. Optimum.

it all sounds so old fashioned now, with injection and computers, chips and so forth. Carbs are just about extinct these days!

Again just my opinion.

 

[stumog]

and i thought we had put this to bed.

 

[clivehorridge]

Sorry, not only old, but slow too